Last week’s gaming activity:

• I bought LostWinds on WiiWare and completed it in about two and a half hours. I had a great time with this one. Really simple, Zelda-like puzzles and fun platforming with the Wii Remote. My arm did get tired, though, pointing it at the screen for like 3 straight hours.
• Picked up Boom Blox over the weekend. Colette and I played some competitive “block throwing” for a while. Tons of fun. We also dabbled in the “jenga” mode a little bit last night, but not too much. And talk about tired arms… this game puts Wii Sports to shame in the arm-workout department.
• Played a few more missions in IV. I’m slowly chipping away to the center on this one. However, as Shawn from GWJ also mentioned, I’m kinda ready to be done with GTA. It’s not that I don’t like the game (I think it’s incredible). It’s just that after all the hours I’ve put into it, the core it still feels like another GTA game, which I’ve played 3 times already. The story is getting a little better, but I still maintain it’s nothing spectacular. Multiplayer is the only true “evolution” of this franchise.

This week: Boom Blox-aholism, Twilight Princess (that’s right, I still haven’t finished it), and maybe Penny Arcade, Episode 1?

So I haven’t been able to get much game time in this week at all, and won’t really be able to this weekend, either. Our wedding’s coming up on June 14th, so there’s marathon planning and preparation going on for the next few weeks until the big day. I did, however manage to get in a little bit of action this week:

• I played a couple more hours of IV during this past weekend. I’ve now unlocked all the islands and am conducting lots of “business” for the New Jersey mafia (hi, Sopranos references). I completed all of the assassin missions, appropriately adorned in my Agent 47 black suit/red tie getup. So far the only comment I can make regarding the “epic, Oscar-worthy storyline” is that it’s marginally more acceptable and tightly held together than the previous GTA’s, but not exactly the massive improvement referred to in the numerous 10.0/A+/5-star reviews.
• I’ve also been having a blast playing short bursts of many of the casual games on Kongregate. Games such as Dolphin Olympics 2, Fancy Pants Adventure, Gravitee, Chronotron, The Beard, Flash Portal, and Pillage the Village. It’s been a while since I played many games on the web. Flash has come so far that the browser can now be considered a distribution and gaming platform that’ll soon hang with the real consoles. If you haven’t played Offroad Velociraptor Safari, for example: first of all, you’ve missed out, and secondly, check out how technically advanced this game is for an entirely web-driven production. I predict all MMOs will soon be browser-based and platform-independent. You heard it here first (not really, everyone says this).
• Played a few more puzzles in Professor Layton, but not really noteworthy progress. Just played a little on our recent drive up to Atlanta for Colette’s bridal shower.

A few games I’m looking forward to soon: The World Ends With You, LostWinds, Boom Blox.

Last night I was truly affected by something that I did in GTA IV. After walking out of my apartment building, I busted out my cell, dialed ‘9-1-1′ on the keypad and asked for the paramedics to come to my location. Taking cover behind a car, I waited for the ambulance to pull up and the medics to get out, popped out from cover and domed the two of them in the street. I don’t know what made me do it, I guess I just wanted to see what my reaction would be to a truly heinous, premeditated attack on innocent bystanders. Not just innocent bystanders, but two people who had gone out of their way to help me (well, they would’ve charged me for it). Capping the two first-responders was definitely unwarranted, and entirely my own decision.

But even though it’s just a game, it still felt wrong. It reminded me of the end of season 1 of The Shield, where the police force’s reaction to a riot in Farmington results in a rash of fake 911 calls causing the murder of several police officers as retaliation. Niko became one of those low-lifes, sadistically luring helpless paramedics into his path of destruction.

There should be more missions incorporating truly questionable acts like I just mentioned. Rather than the “moral quandary” being “should I let this drug dealer fall to his death, or pull him up and save him,” have me get assigned missions where I’m asked to steal a firetruck by pulling a fire alarm and taking out all the responding firefighters. Or to murder a bunch of debtors who are otherwise innocent mothers or fathers, and maybe the alternative is to help them fake their deaths at risk of it being discovered by your employers…

And a side note: I wish they had done more with the cell phone. Maybe letting you actually dial more numbers instead of only using the speed dial, and letting me program the speed dial myself. Maybe I don’t want Brucie in my phone book if I never want to hang out with his roided-out ass…

Here’s a short list of notable discoveries from the beginnings of my mayhem-filled journey through Broker:

• You can actually drive legally without much trouble — It seems that the weight of the vehicles is enough that driving feels a hell of a lot more realistic. I’ve heard some complaint about the difficulty of driving, but I guess I’ve played enough GTA and arcade-style driving games to get the hang of it pretty quickly.
• The hand-to-hand combat isn’t as fun as it should be — After recently playing Bully, which has amazing hand-to-hand fighting, I thought IV would incorporate similar mechanics. It’s kinda similar, but a little sluggish and not near as fun. Maybe in multiplayer it’ll be more exciting.
• Niko flying through the front window is awesome — Clearly Rockstar’s version of Eastern Europe doesn’t wear seatbelts.
• Liberty City is frakkin’ huge — I’m driving all over the place, then I look at the full map to discover that I’ve only touched a small chunk of one island. I know it’s not the size of the San Andreas map, but that was at least 50% empty anyways.

Check back for some more talking-points about IV. Maybe by then I’ll be out of virtua-Brooklyn.

Wow, I’ve been playing some serious variety during the last week:

I got into GTA San Andreas Multiplayer, a mod created for the PC version that turns SA into a multiplayer game (SA:MP as it’s known in the community). After listening to last weeks 1UP Yours podcast (podtrac beware!), Shawn Elliott’s recommendation to check it out led me to do just that. SA:MP is the most impressive 3rd-party mod I’ve ever seen. It’s got pretty impressive network performance, on nearly every server I joined. You can get anywhere up to 200 people in a game at once. During my hundreds of hours with the past GTA titles, I’ve always wondered what this looks like… now I know. And just like any typical online PC game, there are hundreds of servers run by admins with a pool of thousands of players at any given time. Servers contain an enormous range of game types, including deathmatch, racing, stunts, minigames, and the most ridiculous: role playing. People run entire RPG servers, and they’re some of the most popular ones. The admins are the cops, people role play taxi drivers, prostitutes, ANYTHING. Pretty insane. Rockstar could definitely learn something from what’s going on with SA:MP. Just go watch some Youtube clips of gameplay to get a good picture of what this is all about.

After my previous post, I was inspired to reinstall the original Fallout. Not much to be said here, as I’m only about an hour in. I’ve recruited Dogmeat to hang out with me and completed a few minor quests in Shady Sands and Junktown.

Burnout Paradise has been in my 360 for over a week now (except for a brief stint with Bully: Scholarship edition, which I’ll get to in a minute). This game has so much potential it’s ridiculous. With Criterion’s upcoming updates, this game seriously will become the “driving MMO.” I mean, if they added a couple more islands, Crash mode, more cars, bikes and planes, new game types, car customization, this game would be the only place you need to go to get an arcade-style driving experience. Period. There’d still be room for the technical sim driving games like Forza and Gran Turismo, but the arcade driving game market would belong to Criterion. They’ll become the Blizzard of online racing.

Now Bully is a game I need to spend some quality time with. I only played an hour or so into it, but I feel like I want to give it a real commitment this weekend. I hadn’t played anything by Rockstar since San Andreas, and the maturation of their open-world game design from that to Bully is incredible. Bodes well for GTA IV next week.